Abstract

In the era of web 2.0, social media has reshaped several industries nowadays, putting citizen’s view at the heart of their strategy and business model. This paper put forward a new approach to examine car parking industry ecosystem from social media perspective as revealed by the structure and insights inferred from hashtags network analysis. Starting with initial car-parking leading hashtags, Twitter data were collected with a special focus on monitoring various hashtags generated as part of this data collection process. An original approach that exploits social network attributes and a set of rational interpretation principles is devised to infer a set of explainable communities. Each community is next analyzed in terms of industry sector interactions, user’s engagement and presence of bots and global trends. The findings reveal useful insights in terms of comprehending the car-parking ecosystem as well as user’s parking behavior. Especially, the results indicate the prevalence of social, economical and technological aspects that impact all detected communities at various degree.